Children’s museum designed to be a great adventure

The bad news: A site that was a former car dealership, basically 5½ acres of cracked, sun-baked asphalt. The good news: Brackenridge Park is directly across the street.

“We wanted the whole experience to be like an extension of Brackenridge Park,” Lake | Flato Architects partner Greg Papay said of the DoSeum, San Antonio’s bright and boisterous new children’s museum at 2800 Broadway.

“As if it had jumped across the street,” echoed project architect Trey Rabke of Lake | Flato.

9of10The DoSeum prepares for its grand opening with last minute adjustments and early kid tours on May, 19, 2015.Photo: Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

10of10The DoSeum team is making final tweaks in advance of its Saturday, June 6 opening.Photo: Tom Reel / San Antonio Express-News

And its landscaping, with century oaks, more than a dozen cypress trees lining Broadway and a babbling Children’s River in the “back yard,” does seem like an extension of the park across the street.

“It’s fun to do something that has the challenge of needing a real presence,” Papay said.

A main reason Lake | Flato was chosen for the DoSeum project, said DoSeum CEO Vanessa Lacoss Hurd, was the firm’s leadership in sustainability — a building’s energy efficiency — and “their ability to integrate the outdoors with the indoors.”

The first major challenge the architects faced was the axis of the site, which is basically north-south.

“An east-west orientation is significantly more energy efficient in a hot climate like Texas,” Papay said.

So they staggered the three exhibition halls — basically “warehouse spaces,” Rabke said — which were built on-site in the tilt-wall construction method.

“The site was long in the wrong direction,” Papay said.

“We also wanted to break up the rhythm of all the front-facing buildings along Broadway to give it a more dramatic feeling from the street,” Rabke added.

The concrete walls were poured on the foundation’s floors and tilted outward and up. The colors were agonized over before settling on red, yellow and grayish green. The colors, Rabke said, “are of the earth, of the region, which is a Lake | Flato tradition.”

“We learned that a cobalt blue composite added to the concrete was 10 times more expensive than some other colors,” Papay said. “And that was beyond budget.”

Although architectural fees for the $47-million DoSeum were not disclosed, Papay said the building cost about $175 a square foot. The 65,000-square-foot museum has 26,000 square feet of indoor exhibit space and 39,000 square feet of outdoor play space.

That’s why they chose the tilt-wall method, which is inexpensive, and left the structural supports and mechanical and lighting systems exposed in the ceilings.

“And we also thought that a certain kid might be walking along and look up and see how a building is constructed,” Papay said. “So the building itself is educational.”

They worked hand-in-hand with the exhibit creators, Argyle Design of Brooklyn, which helped save money and made spaces more efficient.

Along with the east-west orientation, other cost-saving — and energy efficient — elements of the DoSeum include a water-collection system for air-conditioning condensation that irrigates the landscape; bioswales along Broadway and in the parking lot to collect and absorb water runoff; and sailcloth canopied structures resembling kites for shading.

“The canopies really draw you in from the parking lot, too,” Rabke said.

The DoSeum has 616 solar panels on its roof, providing 228,000 kilowatt hours a year, which is enough electricity to power a laptop for 570 years or provide hot water for showers for 375 people a year, according to City Public Service.

“The panels provide about 30 percent of the building’s power, which is a good number,” Papay said.

Although Lake | Flato has worked on projects at the Witte and the Briscoe museums, the DoSeum is its first children’s museum.

“With a lot of buildings it’s nice to have a lot of experience in the field,” Papay said. “But with others, and I think this is one of them, it’s better not to bring your whole basket of design ideas to the table.

“I think the building is fun for a kid, he added, but also a sophisticated building for an adult.”

Growing up in Houston, Steve Bennett started reading the newspaper before he even entered kindergarten. Ok, it was the comics, but still. It instilled in him a love of reading and art that carried him through Temple High School in Central Texas and the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating with a degree in journalism in 1982, Steve went to work for the San Antonio Light, covering the arts. When the Light closed, he found work in Olympia, Wash. as a features editor and endured the soggy weather for two years before getting homesick and returning to Texas. Steve's been with the Express-News for 15 years, first as an editor in the features section, the last 10 or so covering books, the visual arts and most recently architecture and design.